Coaching for women, as more than "men with boobs"

Coach Lauren Fleshman (photo: Leah Nash for the New York Times)

In recent years, more and more revelations about the abuse of female runners have come to light. Between the scandal out of the Nike Project of Coach Alberto Salazar doping and mistreating athletes, female athletes sponsored by a range of athletic brands drawing attention to contracts that penalized women for getting pregnant, and Mary Cain’s brave testimony about being bullied by coaches about her weight, it’s easy to come away with the impression that the world of elite running holds no space where female athletes can train hard, run fast, and thrive as human beings.

That’s why I was thrilled to come across this profile in the New York Times of retired professional runner Lauren Fleshman, now Coach Lauren Fleshman.

Fleshman, followers of running will remember, is the athlete who won five N.C.A.A. titles and was a 15-time All-American while at Stanford, and then early in her career as a pro runner, won two national championships in the 5km and placed seventh in the 5km at the World Championships… at the time, the highest-ever finish by an American woman at that distance.

Fleshman, center left in the Stanford uniform, on the way to winning an N.C.A.A. title in the 3000-meter race in 2002. Photo by Gary Yandell/NCAA Photos, via Getty Images.

But then, her running career started to fall apart. She had injury after injury, including four stress fractures, and missed qualifying for the 2008 and 2012 Olympic teams. What happened?

As Fleshman herself described in a 2019 New York Times op-ed, “I restricted my diet to make my 21-year-old body, still soft from the new estrogen infusing it, look like the leaner 28-year-old women I saw making Olympic teams. I wasn’t ready for that kind of body. I made myself into it anyway. I may have looked the part, but I lost my energy. I lost my period, and injuries set in, derailing the first half of my professional running career.”

She goes on to explain that while male athletes tend to follow a linear performance curve, becoming steadily stronger and leaner as they grow, age and train, the female performance curve is different, involving a dip in performance, weight gain and an increase in bodyfat percentage in the late teens and early 20s as girls’ bodies become women’s bodies. After that, if you’ve made it through the process in a healthy way, you can then become stronger and fitter in your late 20s to 30s, the age at which we tend to see women breaking speed records, topping podiums, and winning the biggest marathons in the world.

The problem is, as Fleshman writes, “girls train in a system that holds up the more linear, male performance curve as the ideal. When [girls’] biological performance curve is not normalized and supported, women and girls are faced with a choice: fight their body’s changes, or ride it out and be declared undedicated. “

Which leads to the obvious next question: what would a training system look like that DID support and normalize the female performance curve, rather than - as Fleshman perfectly encapsulates - being coached as if they’re “men with boobs”?

Coach Fleshman is designing it right now.

Some of Littlewing’s athletes, via Twitter

In 2013, Fleshman founded Littlewing Athletics, an elite running club for runners whose events range from the 800m to ultramarathons. Using her own background from her Stanford studies in Human Biology with a concentration in Women’s Health and Athletic Performance, Fleshman’s goal is to build world-class athletes who emerge from their running careers stronger people, not shattered by the experience, as is too often the case today. As Fleshman describes the approach:

I believe in coaching the athlete and person in front of me. There are many ways to get athletic results that cause physical, emotional, or mental damage to the athlete. As a professional athlete I tried on several of them in the first half of my career, tending to chew on the question “what makes great athletes great?” with a short term perspective. Over my 13 years as a professional middle distance runner, I learned the perils that come from fracturing your athletic self from your human self. I watched and learned from the athletes who flashed and fizzled, and the athletes who walked away broken, and the athletes who had resilience and satisfaction and longevity to go with their results. And now that most of my peers are retired like me, I have a clearer picture of what makes for a career you can be proud of and look back on fondly.

I love coaching, but I do not have any interest in coaching if it involves stunting the development of the human being, or otherwise creating harm, to do it. And so I only work with athletes who share this goal of world class performance and human development. We develop the athlete’s form, efficiency, fitness, and power, but also autonomy, physiological literacy, communication skills, deep inner confidence, and resilience strategies. The longer I work with an athlete, the less they need me, and the more they know they can depend on themselves. This is the development of an internally motivated, resilient, and confident human being, and it takes time and hard work. Success in sports should be pursued in such a way as to be able to transfer that success into the rest of life after sport. Train and prepare this way, and your upward potential is ultimately higher, as well as your ability to get consistent improvement, and your capacity to feel joy and satisfaction from your efforts.

I’m pleased that the New York Times dedicated column inches to profiling Coach Fleshman and Littlewing. Though I might have chosen a different headline (why not “science-based” approach? or “longevity-focused” approach? or “biologically sound” approach?) I am glad Fleshman’s work is garnering attention. Here’s hoping that some of the people who read the article also choose to support Littlewing with a donation, and that as Littlewing athletes dominate podiums around the world, other training programs will adopt their approach too.

Read on, and see you on the trail!

By Michelle Hamilton - October 16, 2020

When the sports calendars began to fall victim to the pandemic, the athletes of Littlewing, an elite training group in Bend, Ore., sat down to talk about running in a world without racing.

The team — a group of six female athletes including Rebecca Mehra, a miler who put herself on the map in 2019 with a third-place finish at the Fifth Avenue Mile in New York City — had just knocked off a tough workout on a dirt road in the middle of the Deschutes National Forest. The women set up lawn chairs on the side of the road, socially distanced only from their coach, the former elite runner Lauren Fleshman, who was not initially in their quarantine pod.

Once the women were settled, Fleshman posed some questions: What is running to you and who are you if there are no races, no championships, no money to be made, no performance aspect at all? Then what?

The pandemic prompted the question, but the idea wasn’t new. Fleshman had been asking similar questions for the last few years as part of her goal of changing the way elite women view running. If she could help athletes see themselves beyond their speed and their looks — attributes typically valued in female runners — she hoped they could avoid the physical and mental dangers posed by the win-at-all-costs culture that has harmed so many in the past.

“If you strip away a narrow view of an athlete, what’s left is the freedom to be yourself,” Fleshman said. “That’s where the power lies.”

Littlewing runners take off during a track workout in Bend, Ore. The team now has seven runners. Photo by Leah Nash for The New York Times

Earlier this year, for instance, Fleshman helped the steeplechaser Mel Lawrence map out goals for the year. Lawrence was focused on napping and cross-training. Fleshman added an unquantifiable metric: Owning who you are.

“I carried myself better in practice,” said Lawrence, who joined Littlewing in 2013 when the group first formed with four athletes. “It affected how hard I pushed, what I put into the workout.”

The idea of a women-centered approach to coaching grew out of Fleshman’s own experience as an athlete. A top runner in high school in Southern California, she won five N.C.A.A. championships in college, including three consecutive outdoor titles in the 5,000. When she went pro, she won two national championships in the 5,000 and placed seventh at the World Championships in the 5,000 in 2011, what was then the highest-ever finish by an American woman at that distance.

But Fleshman believes she never reached her full potential as an athlete, due, in part, to focusing too much on body size. Early in her professional career, she compared her weight to that of the top female athletes on the World Athletics website. To be successful, she calculated, she needed to lose eight pounds. With restrictive eating and hard training, the weight fell off, and she got faster. So Fleshman kept at it.

“If the scale moved in the wrong direction, it would haunt me,” she said.

Health problems followed. Fleshman stopped menstruating, suffered four stress fractures, and was plagued by injuries that contributed to missed opportunities, including not making the 2008 and 2012 Olympic teams.

She was not alone. Around her, Fleshman saw other female athletes suffering under the pressure to prioritize their performances above their health. “I watched it destroy lives,” she said, a harsh reality that came to the fore late last year when the elite runner Mary Cain and others publicly accused coach Alberto Salazar at Nike of verbal abuse. This spring, female athletes at Wesleyan University detailed a culture of body shaming promoted by their coach, who has since retired.

To flourish, Fleshman said, female athletes need an environment that honors their physiology, and acknowledges and counters the realities of sexism. “Historically female athletes have been coached as men with boobs, but the male standard clashes with the female experience,” she explained.

Studies have shown disordered eating affects up to 45 percent of female athletes, and can lead to Relative Energy Deficiency in Sports, or RED-S, an energy deficiency caused by eating too little for your activity level. The syndrome affects bone density, hormone levels and other crucial health markers that put athletes at high risk for injury and mental and emotional stress, particularly in a sport like running where weight can play a role in performance.

There’s a talent leak in running, Fleshman said. Many strong female athletes fall through the cracks because of injuries and unsupportive training environments. She wanted Littlewing, a team of now seven runners, to be a patch in the system.

Fleshman and Dr. Sarah Lesko, M.D., an elite athlete manager at Oiselle — the women-led sports apparel company that sponsors Fleshman’s team — talk almost daily about each athlete’s physical, mental and emotional health. And while blood tests to monitor key health markers like stress hormones and red blood cells are routine, there are no weigh-ins or comments about weight.

“There’s really no need to talk about weight unless there’s an unexpected swing,” Fleshman said. “In that case, the dialogue would be from a health perspective.”

Irritability and mood swings can be a precursor of RED-S, so Fleshman, who has a bachelor’s degree in human biology and a masters in education, talks often to her athletes about their energy and mood.

“And periods,” said Fleshman. “I ask a lot about periods.” Amenorrhea, the absence of a period, is a marker of RED-S and reported to affect as many as 60 percent of elite female middle- and long-distance runners.

During practice, Fleshman, left, spends time checking in with each athlete and making adjustments accordingly, a novel concept to some runners who are accustomed to training in a suck-it-up environment. Photo by Leah Nash for The New York Times

Fleshman began to see the potential in a new coaching model for women in 2010 when she began exploring who she was outside of athletics, by co-founding Picky Bars and co-authoring a training journal. She attributes her performances in 2010 and 2011 to the start of her living and training on her own terms.

But it wasn’t until late 2012 when she met Lesko and Sally Bergesen, the Oiselle founder and chief executive, that Fleshman fully understood what was possible when female athletes were the single central focus. She signed a contract with a maternity protection clause. The contract did not have reductions for injuries, race quotas or rankings.

“I didn’t have to convince anyone of my worth as a female athlete,” Fleshman said, noting Oiselle signed her knowing she was pregnant with her first child. This was six years before Nike bowed to public pressure from its athletes and changed the structure of its contracts to accommodate for both injuries and pregnancies.

Ultimately, Bergesen hopes to see Littlewing become an established center of power for female athletes that helps influence the industry.

The idea of a women-centered approach to coaching grew out of Fleshman’s own experience as an athlete. Photo by Leah Nash for The New York Times

For Fleshman, who is working on a book that highlights the need for a different coaching model for girls, success as a coach means her athletes will eventually need her less and less. During practice, she spends time checking in with each athlete and making adjustments accordingly, a novel concept to some runners who are accustomed to training in a suck-it-up environment.

“We state our own needs and they’re accepted and heard,” marathoner Carrie Mack said of her coach. “That’s what’s radical, and empowering.”